Doomed Youth and the End of the Old World: English and European Literature of the First World War

3 units

“Doomed Youth” and “The End of the Old World” appear as twin figures in the literature of the most tumultuous event in modern history: the First World War. This was a war, these writers attest, that was fought by the young but authored by the old. It witnessed the decimation of one generation and the unmaking and remaking of the political, cultural, and literary conventions of the preceding century. It draws a line through time in imaginative understanding. It sets off a former world of assignably “traditional” values and introduces a number of recognizably “modern” phenomena—of “world” war, since almost all the European nation states (and their colonial populations) were plunged into the conflict; of “total” war, where all the economic, cultural, and human resources of each nation state were mobilized for the military effort; and of “atrocity” as a commonplace of experience, where the weaponry invented for the dimensions of mass warfare produced an indiscriminate “overkill” as a routine feature of strategy. We approach the broad European import of the war in this course by reading its national literatures comparatively. Moving beyond the motivated interests of any one country, we will be working to discern the points of overlapping emphases and contrasting values in the literary record of the major national protagonists: Great Britain, Germany (and Austria), and France. While original language editions of these literary works are available, all our working texts will come in English translation. It will feature the landmark works of English poets and novelists Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and Rebecca West, German and Austrian and Czech writers like Joseph Roth and Ernst Jünger and Franz Kafka, and French literary greats like Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau. Our readings move through three major phases. We begin with the powerful immediacy of trench poetry and contemporary combat narratives (1914-1919), develop into the more constructed stories of the great postwar novels and memoirs (1920-1931), and then turn toward the retrospect of the 1930s, which is also the prospect on the next, now inevitable, war. In the narrative of literary history, we will see the forms and genres of literature undergoing a transformational change, where, say, the pastoral circumstance of turn-of-the-century verse gives way to the lyric realism of an identifiably “new” poetry, and the end-oriented narratives of character development in Victorian novels change to a pattern of time in which the future has disappeared. This is the literature of history, and it provides the most vivid and intense record of this watershed event in western modernity.